Books in Brief: Nonfiction

By Gerald Jonas

Published: December 26, 1999

GREETINGS, CARBON-BASED BIPEDS!

Collected Essays, 1934-1998.

By Arthur C. Clarke.

Edited by Ian T. Macauley.

St. Martin's, $35.

Science in our time has been given the franchise for explaining how the world works. This awesome responsibility includes translating the insights and equations of scientists into language the rest of us can understand. No one carries off this task with more authority and good humor than Arthur C. Clarke, who turned 82 years old on Dec. 16. Arranged chronologically, ''Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!,'' a compilation of previously published essays, reviews and other opinion pieces, serves as a kind of intellectual autobiography. In selections from the 1930's and 40's, we meet Clarke the ardent promoter of space travel, trying to convince the skeptics and bean counters that going to the moon is not only possible but worth the cost. Later, when he has become a celebrity of sorts -- thanks to more than 20 nonfiction books and landmark science fiction novels like ''Childhood's End'' and ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (which he wrote while writing the movie with the director Stanley Kubrick) -- Clarke broadens his scope considerably. But whether he is warning about the dangers of asteroid impacts or evoking the pleasures and perils of scuba diving, he teaches a lesson all but forgotten in today's culture wars: an open mind and strongly held opinions need not be incompatible. Arguably, Sir Arthur (he was knighted in 1998) has done more than anyone in the 20th century to explain science to the multitude. Gerald Jonas